INTRODUCTION OF DIGITAL COMPUTERS AND DIGITAL SYSTEMS�
- Digital systems are used in communication, business transactions, traffic control, spacecraft guidance, medical treatment, weather monitoring, the Internet, and many other commercial, industrial, and scientific enterprises
- The most striking property of the digital computer is its generality. It can follow a sequence of instructions, called a program, that operates on given data.
- The user can specify and change the program or the data according to the specific need. Because of this flexibility, general‐purpose digital computers can perform a variety of information‐processing tasks that range over a wide spectrum of applications..
- One characteristic of digital systems is their ability to represent and manipulate dis-crete elements of information.
- Discrete elements of information are represented in a digital system by physical quantities called signals.
- The signals in most present‐day electronic digital systems use just two discrete values and are therefore said to be binary. A binary digit, called a bit, has two values: 0 and 1. Discrete elements of information are represented with groups of bits called binary codes.
- A digital system is an interconnection of digital modules. To understand the operation of each digital module, it is necessary to have a basic knowledge of digital circuits and their logical function.